For the opening scene of Wicked, 9m real tulips were planted, improbably, by a farmer in Norfolk. The necessity of this opulence was completely obvious to director Jon M Chu and production designer Nathan Crowley – otherwise they’d have to use CGI for the Munchkin Village. Is CGI lush? Does it recall the heady, future-facing surge of hope and optimism that the original Oz has come to represent for, goddammit, almost a century? It does not. While it isn’t for the production values alone that Wicked deserves the best picture Oscar – anyone can spend money if they have enough money – take a second to consider the commitment of this film, and its impossibility. It tries to remain true to the moment when the world discovered Technicolor (sure, sure, come at me with The Toll of the Sea some other time); cheerfulness, magic, a naive faith in cinema and beyond – these are quite big asks in 2024, and Wicked went for it.
It was partly in tribute to that quality of early musicals that Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande performed all the songs live; lip-syncing as an innovation has brought increased slickness to a movie’s sound quality, but at the expense of stripping out jeopardy and emotion from the human voice. Clearly, Erivo and Grande could both lift a building off its foundations with their vocals – the last thing you’d describe them as being is “fragile” – but it’s a “whites of their eyes” thing. You never realised you needed to see the muscles move in a singer’s throat to believe that they really mean it – yet it turns out, you do.
